Even an Omake, Should it Please You
by DezoPenguin
Summary: Because obviously nothing so blatantly screams "humor fic collection" than the struggle of an undying hunter against blood-crazed beasts, lunatics craving the Eldritch Truth, and abominations from beyond the waking world, right? Right?
1. That Was a Positive Test, Good Hunter

Balyn pushed himself upright, rising to a standing position in front of the gravestone. The messengers sprouting from its base looked up at him expectantly, eager to help by sending him back to the waking world of Yharnam, but he waved them off. After his last embarrassing (albeit temporary) exit from the mortal coil, he really wasn't all that exited to head back right away. Instead, he tugged down the cloth mask that covered his face and took a deep breath of the moon-scented air.

It was odd, he thought. Underneath the mask, after his exertions, his beard had become matted with sweat, plastered to his face. Yet now it was nothing of the sort; the whiskers were brisk and springy. It was little different than how the blood vanished from his skin and clothing whenever he traveled to or from the Hunter's Dream, almost as if his body had been recreated anew in each place. Balyn supposed it made sense; who'd ever heard of having a dream about fighting monsters and waking up covered in blood?

Shrugging, he walked over to the Doll, who stood waiting patiently in her usual place.

"Hey, there," he called jauntily. "Didn't catch you out napping on the job this time, did I?"

"Welcome home, good hunter," she replied in her eternally placid tone. "What is it you desire?"

"I've got a message for you, actually."

The Doll tipped her head to one side, curiosity and confusion mingled on her porcelain face.

"I ran into this lady...well, her daggers ran into me at least. Repeatedly. Eileen the Crow, her name was. Anyway, she said to tell you that she said hello."

"I...remember that name," the Doll said. "She used to visit here, though that was long ago. I hope that she is doing well."

"Better than I am, at least," Balyn said. He supposed he shouldn't feel jealous, since after all the Hunter's Dream brought him back to life whenever he was killed in the waking world and the Doll knew that well enough. "She called herself a Hunter of Hunters. I guess she goes around putting down hunters that she thinks have gotten too close to beasthood or mad with blood or something? If you ask me, though, that crow comes off as a complete fanatic."

"Why is that, good hunter?"

"Because she takes her _caw_ s way too seriously."

"I see."

Balyn shook his head.

"No, no, that was a joke, see? Cause—caws. Because she's Eileen the Crow, right?" The Doll's expression never changed, and he shook his head again. "Never mind. I guess whatever it is that lets you walk and talk and feel, it didn't give you a sense of humor."

The Doll tipped her head to the side again.

"Perhaps one day we could test that, good hunter?"

Balyn buried his face in his leather-gloved palm.

"...I think I was better off taking my chances with Eileen."


	2. That Insight Wasn't Worth Spending

Balyn barely got his blunderbuss up in time. The heavy gun boomed even as the elegant woman's twin blades sheared past, spraying blood in their wake. Fragments of quicksilver blasted into her chest, stunning her and dropping her to her knees.

He jumped forward, hand outstretched like a claw for the finishing blow…only to step right into the flame cloud that trailed the arc of blood from Lady Maria's attack. He grunted in pain, but the true loss wasn't his charred eyebrows. It was the way he staggered at the shock of it, giving Lady Maria the chance to shake off her momentary paralysis.

He was still cursing under his breath when she cut off his head a moment later.

 _At least I won't have to worry about burn scars_ was the thought that went through his mind the instant before Lady Maria's sword did.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter. What is it that you desire?"

"New weapons, better reflexes, and a strategy that will actually work. That's eight times that she's killed me. Eight!"

The Doll tilted her head to one side, regarding Balyn with open curiosity.

"This seems to bother you, good hunter. Have there not been many such encounters?"

"…Not actually helping."

The Doll did not respond to this statement.

"Maybe the problem is the familiarity," Balyn mused, taking a second look at her.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, this Lady Maria is a hunter, not a beast, so that's part of it, but what's more, she looks a lot like you. I mean, almost _exactly_ like you, if you were human and had skin and stuff. Even her voice is the same. It's like the guy who built you modeled you on her or something."

Saying it out loud, the hunter thought that sounded more than a little creepy. The Doll did not openly react, though, being a doll. Which was actually kind of significant, he realized.

"You're pretty different, though. I mean, as people," Balyn hastened to add. "I mean, you've got this whole 'cool beauty' thing going on, all poised and stoic, while Lady Maria…" He grinned at her. "She's really what I'd call…hot-blooded."

The Doll gave him her head-tilted curious look again.

"Good hunter, are you sure you are well? I have heard that frustration can disturb a human's mental equilibrium."

~X X X~

 _A/N: Somebody had to make that pun. Also, Plain Doll best_ tsukkomi _._


	3. Admittedly, He's Begging the Question

Blood spattered, hot and wet, across Balyn's face, making the hunter glad of the cloth mask covering his nose and mouth. He wiped his glove across his upper face, clearing his stinging eyes. The bestial huntsman lay crumpled at his feet, bent nearly double between the wall and a wooden crate, its wounds still steaming. Balyn grinned savagely behind the mask at his victory. That had been a close one!

He reached for the nearby ladder and started to climb. The rickety framework of cut tree limbs lashed together swayed under his weight, and he imagined it tearing away from the wall and sending him plummeting into the ravine far below. Like most of Yharnam's construction, though, it remained stable even when at its most shaky-looking, and he soon found himself on a narrow ledge. There seemed nowhere else to go but back into the windmill, so he made his way across the massive (and thankfully stationary) gears to another door leading into the open air on the far side.

The ledge over here was much larger, probably being the roof of an attached structure to the windmill proper, though Balyn still had to pick his way along carefully. At first he noticed nothing of interest, but in a corner off to his right he noticed several figures. At first, he thought they were just corpses, an all-too-common sight on the night of the hunt, but at a second glance Balyn realized one was actually moving.

"Hey, there!" the hunter called.

"What? Oh? Blimey! Don't scare me like that!" Obviously startled, the man whipped around, then relaxed and pushed himself to his feet. He wasn't in good shape, Balyn realized, wearing only ragged trousers and a bandage-like rag around his hair and eyes. A scrubby beard decorated his chin and blood spattered his hands and arms.

Obviously an innocent villager, who had survived a desperate struggle against the beasts that infested this place!

"Well met, friend," Balyn said as heartily as he could manage. "It's good to see another human face. You're the only one I've seen that hasn't yet caught the scourge since I entered this wood. Well, except the dead, of course." He glanced at the chewed bodies at the beggar's feet. Luckily, Balyn had come along in time to save the poor man from a similar fate!

"Yeah. I don't think I can keep on out here much longer. It's about time I made a move, if there's anywhere left to move to. Maybe you can help. I gather it was you who put down that awful beast?"

 _He must mean that giant huntsman with the plow. That beast had him cut off from getting safely back down._

Balyn grinned broadly, a gesture lost on his audience because of the mask. Realizing this, he raised his cleaver in a show of conviction.

"That's right," he said. "I came, I sawed, I conquered."

The beggar seemed to stare at him from beneath the bandages for a long moment.

"You know, I was going to ask if you knew of any safe havens to go to, but…I think I'll wait for someone a little more normal to come along."


	4. An Unstable Platform

Being a hunter tied to the Dream was often difficult work. The more he did, the more Balyn felt like Yharnam's trashman, cleaning up the refuse produced by blood ministration, research into the so-called Eldritch Truth, the search for the Great Ones, the hunt for the lost secrets of fallen Pthumeru, and all the other howling abominations against nature and basic sanity pursued by pretty much everyone he'd met. Sometimes, the problems posed by the Healing Church and its misbegotten rise to power were subtle and complex, with results that played out over the dance of years and stretched between layered dream-worlds until one was never quite sure what "awake" meant.

Other times, the problems were refreshingly direct, such as a beast the size of a house that hit like the Grand Cathedral was falling in on him while it belched lava that burned his body down to charred bones.

~X X X~

"That went poorly," he summed up as he reawakened in the Hunter's Dream. The raw heat of the battle was gone, but Balyn still pulled off his cap and mask and let the cool autumn air of the Dream soothe his face.

"Welcome home, good hunter," the Doll said. "Did your hunt go well?"

His eyes narrowed as he glanced at her. It was all well and good that she felt liberation from heavy shackles, but he was getting the strong suspicion that she found his numerous fatal mishaps amusing, like the pratfalls of a carnival clown.

 _Ah, well, the kid needs some entertainment, stuck in this place with Old Sourpuss._

"It was…efficient," he decided. "I'll say this for Laurence: he did not keep me hanging around in suspense. It's rare to meet a clergyman who gets right to the point instead of making you sit through the whole sermon. Of course, that's probably because he knows all he's got to say is a load of hot air."

There were no crickets in the Hunter's Dream, but Balyn swore he could hear them chirping.

"Anyway," he said, "do you know where Gehrman's got to? I'd like to talk to him."

"Oh? What has caused your interest?"

"Well, he was around when the Healing Church got going, I think, and I'm really curious as to how its philosophy caught on with the people of Yharnam enough that it became powerful."

"Does this surprise you, good hunter?"

"A lot! 'Cause from what I've seen, this Laurence guy who founded it doesn't have a leg to stand on."


	5. The Hunter Wants to Be the Guy

Balyn was smirking as he returned to the Hunter's Dream. Of course, there was no one around to see it other than the Plain Doll and any messengers who might pop their heads up into this level of reality, and even if there were he was wearing a mask over the lower half of his face, but even so, his posture gave him away.

"Welcome home, good hunter. I take it that the hunt goes well?" said the Doll.

"Indeed it does! The gates of Byrgenwerth are thrown open at last." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I don't know who those cloaked fellows were. Creepy enough on their own, but they were infected by those snake-parasite things."

"That sounds most disquieting."

"Yeah, especially out in a swampy, grave-strewn woods. Those snake guys ought to move into Central Yharnam. As built-up as that place is, I bet that there's all kinds of trouble with the drains that they could help with."

The Doll tipped her head to one side and peered closely at him.

"Good hunter, were you perhaps bitten by one of those serpents and are feeling the after-effects of the venom?"

Balyn sighed.

"Never mind."

"Is there anything else that you desire?"

"Actually, could you channel some blood echoes for me?"

"Very well. Let the echoes become your strength."

The Doll sank to her knees, as Balyn closed his eyes. He extended his hand and felt the cool clasp of her articulated fingers close around it. His heart pounded, and he could feel the rush of his own blood coursing through his body, hot, cold, hot, cold, leaving him surging with power. When she let go he stepped back, shaking his head at the impact of the feeling.

"Whoa, that…that was intense."

"Farewell, good hunter. May you find your worth in the waking world."

He pumped a fist in exultation.

"Feeling like this, I'm sure I will!" He stepped towards the nearest tombstone that the messengers used as portals from the Dream, then spun back and pointed at her.

"Thanks for the help, babe. You're a real doll."


	6. It's Really More of a Pit

The man in the student uniform thrust his hand out towards Balyn even as the hunter was sweeping his long-handled cleaver down in a savage arc. At the last second, Balyn saw the swelling pinprick of darkness against the man's palm, growing in an instant to the size of a marble, then a snowball, a gap into the abyssal cosmos lurking behind reality.

He flung himself aside just in time as tentacles lashed out from the darkness, whipping through the space Balyn had just occupied. His shoulder hit the stone-flagged floor, pain shooting up his arm, but he managed to turn aside, to roll back to his feet.

"Ahhh, majestic!" crooned his enemy. "A hunter is a hunter, even in a dream!"

Balyn snapped the cleaver shut into its saw form and lunged forward.

"Yeah, well, prepare to wake up."

"But alas, not too fast." The man whipped his hands up above his head, something small and glowing blue cradled in them.

 _Oh, crap,_ Balyn thought. He'd seen this before, from the blindfolded woman in Byrgenwerth. Even as his saw tore into the host of the nightmare, stars of brilliant blue exploded from the man's hands and blasted into the hunter's body, burning him to ash with raw star-born energy.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter. What is it that you desire?"

"You know, I'll tell you what I desire," he said to the Doll, pointing squarely at her. She tilted her head to one side, her expression curious. "That guy, Micolash, he fights you in this arena-like room that he locks you into, and then after you beat on him for a while, he runs off and you have to chase him down and do it all over again."

"I'm afraid that I do not understand."

"It's just this:" He rubbed his hands together. "Sure, it's a royal pain for me, but it's a perfect set-up for an audience. Just widen the hole in the top of the room and put seating up there for people to watch. It's just the right size for everyone to get a good view of the action, and that guy really knows how to play to the crowd with his over-the-top antics, too. We could make a fortune to spend when the night of the hunt is over! I'm telling you, Micolash, Host of the Nightmare is the perfect opponent for a good, old-fashioned cage fight!"


	7. He'll Mustard Up the Will to Win

There was something to be said for a lack of subtlety, Balyn thought. Some of his foes mixed it up: rending bites, blunt slaps of clublike limbs, sprays of toxic blood, showers of arcane power drawn from the heart of the abyssal cosmos, and a dozen other horrors. Not so the Watchdog of the Old Lords. It vomited lava. It exploded fire in all directions. It turned itself into a giant fireball and charged at him across the arena. On the occasions when Balyn got in close and hit _it_ , the blood that sprayed from its wounds was more like glowing magma, liquid flame, than either normal blood or the grayish ichor of the kin. There was an elegance to its simplicity.

Not that he was really inclined to sit around admiring its aesthetic appeal as a sweep of the beast's head rendered him down to literal dogmeat yet again.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, go—"

"That does it!" Balyn shouted, storming up the steps to the workshop without even so much as letting the Plain Doll finish her greeting. He flung open the coffin-like storage box and began rooting through the assorted tools, weapons, and general bric-a-brac that he had gathered during the seemingly endless night of the hunt.

"What is it, good hunter?" the Doll asked, having tagged along curiously.

"Aha!" Balyn crowed, pulling out the folded shape of his saw spear. The weapon was similar to his cleaver, only the handle and saw were straight rather than curved, and the blade's serrations were on both sides. He then turned his head and flinched in surprise; the Doll usually didn't come up here in Gehrman's domain. "Ah! Don't sneak up on a fellow like that!"

"I did speak to you," she pointed out.

"Well, be louder; I was making too much noise to hear you."

She did not change expression, but he nonetheless felt disapproval washing off of her at his rudeness. Some days Balyn thought the Doll would be a good mother; she had that way about her that let you know you were being naughty and left you squirming about it with just a _look_.

"A-anyway," he stammered past the point, "I'm getting tired of being baked into a puppy biscuit over and over again. There's a saying where I come from...wherever that is...about there being no bad dogs, but I've decided that doesn't apply in Yharnam!"

"If it's called a 'watchdog,' then doesn't that mean that it is properly doing its job?" the Doll wondered.

"...Okay, that's a point. But either way, I'm going to have to rely on special tactics to deal with that mutt! Do you know if we have any dill blood gems? I've seen warm, damp, sharp, heavy..."

"I do not think that I have ever heard of a dill blood gem. Why do you want to find one?"

"Because, good Doll, a hot dog is best served with a pickle spear." He snapped the saw open to its extended mode with a dramatic flourish. "And believe you me, I'm going to take him down with relish."


	8. Just Hoping to Spark a Reaction

With the last of his strength, Balyn swung the extended form of his cleaver in a wild, overhand arc, chopping down into the skull of the raging darkbeast. With a hideous scream, it dropped to its belly in the dirt, the crackling blue sparks that had so entranced the eccentric Archibald guttering out.

 _Now!_

Even as he gasped for breath through the cloth mask covering his lower face, the hunter took two steps forward and rammed his hand through the darkbeast's eye socket, grabbing hold of… _whatever_ was inside there and _ripping_.

The results were more than he could have hoped. Paarl spasmed convulsively, arching its back, and exploded into a shower of green mist.

Pausing only to scoop up an old, battered badge that had fallen from the creature's neck, Balyn stepped over to the suddenly-appearing lamp and let the messengers whisk him away to the Hunter's Dream.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter," the Plain Doll said. "You seem to be in high spirits."

"Darned right!" he said, pumping his saw cleaver in the air in an enthusiastic gesture. "I got grabbed on the street, shoved into a sack, and hauled off to a dank cell in some strange corner of the city—but I found my way out, hacked my way through dogs and giant pigs and a bunch of those hooded guys like the one who kidnapped me, and finally took out a darkbeast to make my escape!"

The Doll applauded his achievement…or possibly just his antics.

"That sounds very impressive, good hunter. I have heard from other hunters that darkbeasts were once a great scourge in the ailing land of Loran."

"Is that right? I bet you thought I'd say that I was pretty shocked to fight one in Yharnam, then, didn't you?"

The Doll looked at him without so much as a flicker in her expression.

"Do you really want to ruin the mood so quickly, good hunter?"

"Well, as a matter of fact, I wasn't all that surprised. I kind of expected those sparks from the bolt stuff I found around the village, so the battle played out pretty much how I thought it would. Really, fighting Darkbeast Paarl was a pretty bare-bones experience."


	9. Gone Fishing

"Blast it!"

Of course, "blast it" was exactly what Balyn had just failed to do. He'd wanted to hurl a flaming Molotov cocktail into a cluster of oil-filled urns, setting off an explosion that would consume the giant shark-faced fishman that had lumbered around the corner of the decrepit, barnacle-encrusted building. He'd wanted to repay the thing for nearly giving him a heart attack when he was just trying to run down one of the harpooners.

 _Well, you can't always get what you want._

 _Especially when you have lousy aim,_ he added as the Molotov shattered harmlessly against the wall of the building, the wood so sodden and slimy that it was no more flammable than Yharnam brickwork.

Balyn flung himself aside just in time to avoid the bulk of the giant as it hurled itself at him in a sliding tackle, hurtling across the watery square. He got to his feet, but now the harpooner was on him, plunging its spear down in a running charge, and Balyn barely sidestepped the attack in time to keep from being the catch of the day. Growling, he raised his saw cleaver and slashed out, ripping the serrated teeth through the fishman's hide like it was a flensing knife, spattering the corrupted ichor that served the thing for blood.

He was just raising his cleaver to deliver the finishing blow when he was suddenly seized from behind, clasped in two giant fishbelly-white hands, and lifted into the air. He kicked frantically, trying to free himself, but could do no more than look back over his shoulder helplessly as the monstrous creature opened its jaws wide...and bit down.

~X X X~

"There ought to be some kind of consolation prize for this," Balyn sighed as the sweetness of moonflowers replaced saltwater and decaying sea slugs in the air. "Some kind of collectible with every twenty-five deaths. Saw cleaver keychains. Messenger plushies."

"Welcome home, good hunter," the Plain Doll greeted his muttering. "Are...you all right?" She tilted her head to get a better look at his face.

"What? Oh, yeah, sorry. Seaside towns just always make me think of tourist stuff. I don't know, maybe I once worked a summer job at a resort town?"

He rose to his feet, stretching out the imaginary stiffness from his newly uninjured body.

"Anyway, back to work. Hey! You guys!" he called out to the messengers in the bath. "Do you have anything like a crawfish for sale?"

"A crawfish, good hunter?" If anything, the Doll looked even more puzzled.

"It's the first rule of fishing: always use the right bait. And I'm pretty certain now that those giant fishmen are"—he rubbed his rump ruefully, remembering shearing teeth—"definitely bottom feeders."


	10. He's More in League with Carpetbaggers

The decrepit old windmill was still and quiet. Not even the wind outside made a sound, nor was there a creak from its sagging timbers.

The man in the constable's uniform was nowhere in sight. A strange fellow, Valtr. A little too bloodthirsty for Balyn's taste, but he figured that the League master had kind of had a point about the general nonsense running around Yharnam. Between the beasts and the Kin and the mad doctors and the not-very-holy clergy, there really wasn't much argument that this place didn't need a thorough cleansing. Balyn just wasn't sure that a man carrying a giant spinning saw on a stick was the right person for the job.

He glanced down at the weapon he held in his right hand and had the decency to look embarrassed. (Besides, he was wearing a cloth mask over his lower face, allowing himself to preserve his dignity even if he was, as he suspected, blushing like a schoolgirl.)

"It's the spinning!" he said aloud. "Fixed saws on a stick are perfectly reasonable!" The crows outside didn't react, so apparently they bought it. Or did not particularly care, being man-eating crows.

It was probably for the best that the whole line of thought was cut off when Balyn caught sight of an item lying in a shadowed corner. He crouched down and picked it up.

 _I guess he meant it when he said it was his last job as Master of the League._

~X X X~

The Plain Doll was not a particularly expressive person. Apart from one time when she had, somehow, cried at being given a gift, she had never shown any strong emotion to Balyn. He figured that he could probably set the Hunter's Dream on fire and she would react only with mild bemusement. Which, in all fairness, was actually extremely expressive when compared to the average doll.

It was really quite remarkable, then, for her to openly boggle at the figure that had suddenly appeared before her, a figure dressed in a uniform of blue fabric, with gold braid and brass buttons, brandishing a torch like a beacon and wearing on its head what looked like a battered, round pout with a single hole at about eye level.

"Behold!" it bellowed, its voice tinny from beneath the pot. "Come unto me, confederates of the League, and join me in the Hunt! We shall stalk the foulness that haunts the night, and crush vermin until they have to ask us to wipe our boots before we go into the sewers! Rally to my side, o confederates!"

"Good…hunter?"

Balyn was not precisely sure how it was that someone with a face made of porcelain could look like someone had smacked her with a trout, but the Doll somehow pulled it off.

Sighing heavily, he yanked off the Master's Iron Helm.

"I guess that's just not for me."

"What were you doing, good hunter?" the Doll asked.

"Valtr left me this helm. It's the symbol of the master of the League. They're a society of hunters who help one another hunt down and crush vermin, the root of human foulness and impurity that corrupt the blood. Or possibly a society of delusional madmen who hallucinate creepy bugs in the blood of maddened beasts. I'm not sure which, exactly. I don't think they are, either."

"I…begin to see why this person thought you would be a good leader of this group."

Balyn had the sneaking suspicion that the Doll had not been complimenting him.

"Truthfully, I don't think being the leader of the League confederates is for me, though. We differ fundamentally in our labor principles."

"Labor principles?"

"Yeah, I've always been a union man."

~X X X~

 _A/N: I originally gave this particular omake to my wife, Tarma Hartley, on her birthday. The U.S. Civil War has always been one of her areas of interest, so the closing pun was holiday-appropriate!_


	11. It's Probably Just a Touch of Frenzy

**Omake Week 2016, Day 3:** _I've written quite a lot of these_ Bloodborne _omake this year, because...um...I'm channeling Yang Xiao Long and just can't stop making bad puns even when completely inappropriate? So here's another one._

~X X X~

Balyn hurled himself to one side just in time to avoid the stamping hooves of the massive beast. Blood spattered as he rolled past the piled corpses, barely able to retain his grip on the saw cleaver.

 _Too close!_ the hunter thought, pushing himself to his feet. He was just reaching for a blood vial when a terrible whinny of a shriek burst from Ludwig and his eye-lined second maw spewed a stream of brilliant fluid, white as the blood of the Doll. Balyn was too late to react; the jet hit him full-force, slamming him back into the heaped corpses, boiling into his flesh, and his world dissolved as he drowned in glowing madness…

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter."

Balyn twisted his head from side to side, trying to see if any of the sticky fluid was clinging to his garb. Generally, returning to the Hunter's Dream left him clean of all the blood and grime of his hunt, but he really wanted to make sure none of that murky, mushy stuff was clinging to him.

"Welcome home, good hunter?" the Doll repeated.

"Oh. Oh, yeah, hello. Sorry, a little distracted there. There's a lot of weird things in Yharnam, but that's the first time I've ever had something blast a spray of…I don't know, it looked and felt like it came out of someone's head after you crack its skull open."

"That sounds very unpleasant."

"You have no idea. Oh, hey, do you know if there are any medical supplies in all those bottles and boxes in the workshop?

"I'm afraid I don't. Did you speak with Gehrman?"

"I haven't seen him awake since I found the real-world version of this place. Oh, well, maybe the bath messengers have something. I'm sure there aren't any apothecaries in Yharnam."

"Pray tell, good hunter, what is it you seek?"

"I'd like to pick up some throat lozenges before I go back to that nightmare."

"Lozenges? Do blood vials not properly heal your injuries?"

Balyn shook his head.

"They're not for me. I want to give them to Ludwig. He was sounding pretty hoarse."

The Doll tipped her head to one side.

"Good hunter, have you become intoxicated with blood? I would not see you lost to the madness of the nightmare."

~X X X~

 _A/N: Knowing Balyn, he knows what color the Doll's blood is because he tripped over his own feet and accidentally nailed her with his saw cleaver. Probably because his player set down the controller and accidentally hit R2, not that anyone would ever do that. *innocent whistle*_


	12. He's Got to Stick With It

Balyn didn't understand why they called it a "rifle spear." Usually, hunter weapons seemed to have fairly accurate names. His saw cleaver was a giant cleaver that folded up into a saw. It made perfect sense. And the rifle spear, to give its Powder Keg creators credit, was definitely a spear. A six-foot pole with a spike on the end. Which was, unfortunately, not enough to deter the maddened beast he was facing from charging straight at him.

He pulled the trigger, and the integrated gun pumped a spread of a half-dozen or so shards of blood-laced quicksilver into the beast's vaguely canine muzzle. Balyn's timing was off, though, and instead of staggering the beast he was forced to roll aside as its talons ripped through the space where he'd been standing.

"You see?" he protested aloud. "That was definitely a shotgun blast. So why don't they call it a 'blunderbuss spear' or 'scattergun spear' or something like that? I hear the word 'rifle' and I'm thinking of a single powerful shot with a long, accurate range. Maybe even capable of piercing through multiple targets if they're lined up right. Now _that_ would be a rifle."

The Blood-Starved Beast did not seem impressed by Balyn's complaints over firearms nomenclature. It shook its upper body, half-flayed skin flapping around it like a cloak, then reared up on its hind legs and roared. A wave of greenish-gray ichor, a kind of ashen blood, exploded into the air around it, a toxic atmosphere that splashed against Balyn's skin and clothes, filled his lungs as he tried to breathe. The hunter staggered, choking, overcome by the poison, and the beast lashed out at him, claws ripping through cape, vest, and the leather belts strapped across his chest to bite into the flesh beneath.

The impact of the blow sent him sprawling, wounded, into the base of one of the pillars that had once held up the now-shattered roof of the ruined church. It opened up distance between them, but the beast was on the attack at once, bounding towards Balyn in a savagely cruel parody of a friendly dog coming to greet its master. Foaming spittle and poisonous blood sprayed from its snapping fangs as it reared up over the hunter.

In desperation, Balyn flung his rifle spear up, sending it spinning over the beast's head. The horror spun, eyes tracking the spear's flight and biting out at it, teeth closing on the haft to catch it out of the air.

With the last of his strength, the hunter pushed himself upright as he snatched the saw cleaver from his belt. With all the force he could muster he drove the serrated edge down into the beast's exposed back once, then again. The second strike carved through the creature's spine and it collapsed onto the flagstones with a rattling, guttural shriek. Balyn swayed on his feet as he felt the echoing memories of the beast's blood flow into his spirit, and then even that was too much and he, too collapsed as the last of his vitality was consumed by the poison and the blackness of death swallowed him.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter."

"Hi, there," Balyn greeted the animated Doll that apparently served as the hostess of the Hunter's Dream. He grinned cheerily at her and swept her a bow, which she politely returned before she spoke again.

"You seem to be in high spirits, good hunter."

"I am! Thanks for noticing."

"This is somewhat unusual. Generally when you awaken here after dying, you are quite displeased, often prone to a raised voice and considerable profane language. May I ask what is different?"

"That Holy Chalice that Gehrman told me about? Well, I found it, and I beat the beast that was guarding it. Oh, it was tough, but I put it down right before the poison got me, and since _it_ doesn't carry the Hunter's Mark, it's not going to be coming back. And I did it on the first try, without having to have my head bitten off or guts torn open a half-dozen times first."

"That does sound impressive, good hunter. How did you do it?"

"Well, I'd been distracting it with pungent blood cocktails. It'd get one whiff of one and be after it in a flash, letting me get in a couple of clean shots. But I'd run out, and it had me exactly where it wanted me. Only at the last second I flung my rifle spear—which is still a lousy name—and it went chasing that, giving me the opening I needed to finish it off."

"But how did you know it would chase your spear? It surely had no special bloodsmell to act as a distraction."

"Yeah, but…it's not all that hard to get a giant dog to fetch a stick."

~X X X~

 _A/N: Balyn's victory over the Blood-Starved Beast is actually reminiscent of my very first time fighting it. At the end, I had zero blood vials and zero antidotes left, and the poison ticked off the last of my health while "PREY SLAUGHTERED" was still on the screen._


	13. Nightmares Aren't Just for Hunters

"And that," Balyn said, "made getting past him an absolute _beast_."

The hunter wiggled his eyebrows, though his half-smirking twist of the lips was concealed by the cloth mask covering the lower part of his face. The Doll, however, did not respond, not even to tilt her head in one side as she often did at Balyn's more curious antics.

"Ah, well," he said, his shoulders slumping a little. "I'd better get back to it. The night of the hunt isn't getting any shorter."

"Farewell, good hunter. May you find your worth in the waking world."

Balyn turned towards the nearest tombstone. As always, as he approached, a shimmering pool of light opened up at its base and a cluster of tiny, wizened messengers ushered the hunter out of the Hunter's Dream, leaving the Doll standing alone, still and quiet.

For about five seconds.

The light-portal had just begun to face when she whirled towards the tombstone. "You!" she shouted, leveling her finger at the pool, moving so fast her articulated joints clattered with the motion.

Gingerly, one messenger slowly pushed its head up through the light. It pointed to itself, mimicking her head-tilt of curiosity, with an almost hopeful expression.

Hope was not to be found.

"Yes, you! _You_ found this hunter! _You_ gave him the Hunter's Mark! _You're_ the reason I have to stand here listening to his inane prattle and what he thinks are jokes! I swear by the moon, the dream, and the eternal cosmos that if I have to listen to _one more pun_ I will rip you out of that hole and use you to fertilize the garden!"

The messenger didn't yelp, but it did make a sort of burbling gasp and jerked back, startled—whereupon it cracked the back of its head against the tombstone and darkness swallowed it.

Then it blinked, and its eyes opened, parting the darkness. At first it didn't quite understand what had happened. It had been at the Yharnam tombstone, hadn't it? But now it was in the stone bath next to the workshop building with several of its fellows. Its arms were folded over the lip, its head resting on crossed wrists, and it had apparently dropped the Shaman Bone Blade it had been holding up for sale over the edge onto the ground.

 _A dream…_ it realized. It had fallen asleep at its post, like the Doll itself occasionally did.

 _The Doll…_

It snuck a glance at her, but she was standing placidly at her usual spot, awaiting the hunter's return without movement or change of expression.

Even so, the messenger wondered if maybe they ought to offer some new inventory to help the hunter along. Maybe a Blood Rock or two, to help Balyn complete his mission as soon as possible and be freed from the Dream. Just to be on the safe side…

~X X X~

 _A/N: And now we know how Patch 1.09 came to be!_

 _The idea for this omake, with the Doll lambasting the messengers over their choice of hunter, must be credited to (blamed on?) my wife, Tarma Hartley. I believe the appropriate response is "Oh, God, there's two of them!"_


	14. More Like Fashion Nonsense

Fire crackled in the moonlight, its snapping and popping sound damaging the stillness. The heat of the flames washed over Balyn as they clawed at the walls of the old building.

He ignored them. They'd been doing that for what seemed like hours now without so much as budging an inch or consuming a fragment of wood. The Workshop was alight, but it wasn't actually burning. Maybe dream fire didn't burn.

 _No, Laurence had a few counterpoints to that idea_ , he thought. The First Vicar had definitely overdone it when it came to staying toasty warm. A couple of logs, maybe a mug of hot cocoa, those would have been more than enough…

 _Wait, where was I?_

"Good hunter, what troubles you?"

"Yaaah!"

Balyn jerked bolt upright at the unexpected voice. His boot-heel landed on a discarded piece of clothing (one of those shawls, he thought; the Healing Church getting one last shot in at him) and his foot skidded out from under him. He flapped his arms in a desperate attempt to try to keep his balance, failed, and crashed to the floor at the feet of the Plain Doll.

"Did you know that your bootlace is untied?"

"Pardon me, good hunter?"

"Never mind."

He rolled over, shaking his head. A glass orb smashed under his knee, releasing a cloud of mist into the air. Balyn cursed under his breath; trust his luck to crush something that would prevent him from immediately healing the wounds from the glass shards he'd just driven into his leg.

"I should have sold those days ago," he muttered. "Wait, days? I've only been here one night…though it's been an awfully long night, come to think of it. Maybe time is just weird in a dream? The fire's burning normally, but time's not passing so it's not burning down the building! Wait, no, if that was it the flames wouldn't be moving. Argh! All this thinking is making my brain hurt!"

The Doll tilted her head to one side, confused. Balyn hoped it was because she was puzzled by his babbling. That it was the idea of him _thinking_ that she found so unusual…okay, that was probably the more likely choice.

"Good hunter, what is it you are doing? Gehrman awaits you, at the foot of the great tree."

He shook his head, then straightened his feathered tricorn.

"Actually, that got taken care of."

The Doll blinked.

"It did?"

"Uh-huh."

Balyn pushed himself back to his feet.

"Then why have you not yet awakened?"

"Well…um…" _How do I put this delicately?_ "We kind of had a difference of opinion on who was to wake up first, and there was some…er…pointed debate."

"…'Pointed debate,' good hunter?"

"Pointy things were involved. Also shooty things, but nobody says 'shooted debate.' Or even 'shot debate.'"

"So, then, Gehrman…"

"Finally got to wake up, yes. He sounded pretty grateful, to be honest. And if what happened after that is any indication, well, I kind of understand where he was coming from. It makes me think that maybe I should have just taken him up on his offer."

She let out a long sigh. Balyn wished he knew what she thought about Gehrman's fate. They hadn't always seen eye-to-eye, but she'd always been there for him, steadfastly helping out, really going above and beyond what one would expect from a doll.

…All right, "doll" was generally a job with low expectations, but still!

"Then, good hunter, what are you doing?" she asked, avoiding messy emotional or ethical discussions. "It looks as if you are taking out the contents of your storage box and scattering them everywhere. Are you looking for something?"

"A pair of pants," Balyn declared.

"A pair of…pants?"

"Trousers. Leggings. Heck, maybe a skirt would be better; I don't have a great eye for fashion."

"I am not sure that you have the legs for a skirt, good hunter."

"Nah, they're not for me. I need something that'll fit a Great One."

Balyn wasn't sure if it was possible for a doll to look like someone had just belted her on the back of the head with a trout, but she seemed to be making a good attempt at it.

"Look," he said, "Gehrman was one thing, but that critter that showed up afterwards has killed me six times! So dig in and help me find something that'll suit it, because I am sick of being mooned!"

~X X X~

 _A/N: And with that, I get to mark this story "complete"! Balyn's come to the end of his run through Yharnam, and if he ever manages to get the Moon Presence to understand basic decency he'll even manage the best ending. I may well return to writing more shorts for_ Bloodborne _, in which I open up the possibilities for more scenarios outside of this template. Maybe I'll even, Great Ones forbid, try my hand at something more serious in the fandom!?_

 _Or, who knows, maybe someday I'll open this collection back up for more. After all…there's always New Game+_


	15. That Would Be an Eyeful Sight

_A/N: Well…I lasted nearly seven months before another one of these went and peeked out from the abyssal cosmos. Apparently this omake series still carries the Hunter's Mark!_

~X X X~

Balyn had only one thought in his head as he moved through the lore-soaked halls of Byrgenwerth, the wellspring of the Healing Church and the present generation's knowledge of the Great Ones and the eldritch Truth.

 _runawayrunawayRunAwayRUNAWAYRUNAWAY!_

He'd had far too many encounters with the weird, insectoid beings with their bloated, eye-filled heads as he explored the campus grounds. He was out of patience, out of sedatives, and when one of the things plunged down from the observatory tower at him, out of luck.

The grand, sweeping staircase that led down to the ground floor was just ahead of him, though. He grabbed the balustrade rail and used it as a fulcrum so his momentum swung himself around in an arc without any loss of speed. His foot went sailing over the edge, landing two steps down without breaking stride, and then his other boot swung past—

—coming down square on the rounded surface of the threaded cane dropped by that crazy Choir hunter he'd had to fight to get up here—

—and he was plummeting twenty feet through the air to land head-first on the hard floorboards below.

The snap of his neck was, at least, an instantaneous and relatively painless death.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter," the Doll greeted him upon his return to the Dream. "What is it you desire?"

"More sedatives would be good. I think I have some stashed in the box."

"Sedatives? Are you agitated, good hunter?"

Balyn sighed.

"No, I guess not. I mean, those things are pretty frightening, but I've seen worse things in Yharnam." He kicked at a pebble. "I just wish I'd stop screwing up and doing careless, clumsy stuff! What kind of hunter trips and falls down the stairs?"

The Doll chose not to answer the rhetorical question, showing surprising compassion for someone who'd had to put up with him for as long as she had.

"I tell you, it really makes me sympathize with those fellows at Byrgenwerth, though," Balyn continued.

"Really? In what way?"

"Well, that Willem guy apparently had some big insight about lining his brain with eyes so that he'd be able to perceive things that he ordinarily couldn't, and I really get that. I think if I followed in his footsteps it would help a lot, because that way I could keep an eye on myself at all times."


	16. At Least He Could See His Mistake

Charnel Lane was a good name for this place, Balyn thought. From the tumbled stones of the graveyards that filled seemingly every loose space between the buildings and paths, to the corpses dangling from hooks and chains, to the tables strewn with rusted blades and saws, to the small furnace-huts lying here and there just off the street that gave off a foul-smelling stench, this was a place where corpses were processed like some kind of crop. It was utterly dehumanizing in a way that the bestial scourge or even the unholy experiments he'd glimpsed hints of within the Healing Church were not.

Balyn wasn't a man who spent a lot of time thinking philosophically about the hunting business (or anything else, to be fair about it), but he'd savored the irony when he'd used Bone Marrow Ash to charge up his blunderbuss right before he'd used it to blow the Witch of Hemwick's head clean off her grisly, eyeball-stitched cloak.

Of course, because this was Yharnam, he hadn't gotten to sit and savor the dramatic moment. No, he'd had to duck and roll out of the way of a slashing sickle in the hands of one of the witch's ghastly servants, because as it turned out, there wasn't one witch, but two.

But he'd battled back, gotten lost in the corners of the barn-like ossuary cellar the coven had apparently been using for its sadistic rituals. The witch had, in turn, vanished behind the cloak of her magic, but her servants seemed to be blind, unable to find Balyn if he wasn't right next to them or rattling the boards of the wooden walkways.

 _And now I've got you_ , he thought, coming up behind the witch, raising his saw cleaver so as to slam it down into her hunched back and end the dreadful rites of this place.

At least that had been the plan, right until the explosion of magic that burst from her blew him off his feet. Two of the mad minions didn't need sight or sound to spot Balyn then, since his body crashed into their shins.

They thanked him for making it easy for them by quickly finishing him off with equal ease.

~X X X~

"You know, not that I'm complaining at all, but this whole thing where I wake up again after dying is ruining a lot of good dramatic endings."

The Doll who served as caretaker of the Hunter's Dream (okay, allegedly Gehrman was in charge of the place, but Balyn knew which one he'd go to if he wanted something done) tipped her head to the side, as if looking at something confusing from a new angle would allow her to make some sense of it.

It was an expression that Balyn saw a lot of.

"Good hunter, would you rather not be given a second chance to make things right?"

He held up his hands.

"No, no, like I said, definitely not complaining!"

Balyn positively didn't want any misunderstandings of _that_ sort!

"It's just that, well, take this last time. I was so smug about how I had snuck up behind the witch, that I just _knew_ I had her."

"Apparently, you did not?"

"No, and it was because of something really basic. If I'd thought even a little, I'd have realized that the whole time, she was keeping an eye on me."


	17. He Wants It to Be a Defining Moment

Balyn took one step into the Hunter's Dream and pitched over onto his face, collapsing flat on the ground. He managed not to smack into any graves in his fall and the grass was nice and soft, with the faint scent of crushed moonflower petals.

Surely the night of the hunt could wait while he took a short nap?

Soft footsteps and the swish of skirts interrupted Balyn's attempt at sleep.

"Good hunter, are you well? You did not lose your step, did you?"

"I did _not_ trip over a grave," Balyn protested into the dirt. He was slightly offended at the slur on his coordination. "This time," honesty compelled him to add.

"Then what is wrong? It does not appear that you are recovering from death. I sense the ancient echoes. They surround you like an aura, heavy with the permeating will of lost years and the force of those who have gone before you."

Not for the first time, Balyn thought that the Doll did not see the world in the same way that he did.

"No, I'm just exhausted."

She gave him that head-tipped-to-one-side look of curiosity that sometimes seemed to be her default expression around him.

"I had thought that when you returned to this dream, all of your hurts were soothed, and the weariness from your sojourn in the waking world swept away."

"… _Mentally_ exhausted."

There was a moment of silence.

"I can see how you could exhaust your intellectual resources."

 _That…did not sound quite like how I meant it._ He did not press her to clarify her comment. Some things wise men understood they were not meant to know.

The Doll, for her part, did not fear to cleanse her beastly idiocy, for she asked, "What was it that has rendered you so troubled?"

"Seventeen attempts. It took me seventeen attempts to finally get past those things."

"That sounds unpleasant."

"Very much so. Seriously, do they not have dictionaries in Yharnam? Because given how much trouble it took to beat them and the fact that they're dead now, I don't see how they qualify as either living or failures."

~X X X~

 _A/N: While thankfully I am nowhere near as bad as Balyn's player at dealing with those guys, I seriously hate those blue fraggers._


	18. That's Not What She's Starved For

**Omake Week 2017, Day 1:** _This year, Omake Week will be dominated by_ Bloodborne _, with days 1, 3, 5, and 7 being "Even an Omake..." segments. Pack your Sedatives, because that's a lot of puns in one week._

~X X X~

Balyn squinted at his companion. She seemed to be a little out of focus, her outlines a little fuzzy. He didn't think that was supposed to be how it was. Maybe something was going wrong in his head? Ever since he'd arrived in Yharnam, that more or less seemed to be the case. Up was down. Dreams were waking. People were beasts and dolls were people.

 _Definitely something wrong,_ he decided.

Well, Yharnam was the home of advanced healing techniques, blood ministration and all that, so they ought to have medicine to fix a foggy brain.

"An' I've gotta bottle of some of the finest right here!" he said. Balyn tugged down his mask, lifted the neck of the bottle to his lips, and took a swallow. The pungent flavor hit him like a runaway carriage, redolent of spices and the hot, thick scent of primal passions.

Passions.

The empty flask slipped from his hand to join the eight or so others he and his drinking companion had gone through. The blood pounded in his veins, or maybe his belly. Was she feeling it too, the flush of heat, the almost bestial energy surging for release?

He wasn't used to women who were taller than he was, but hey, if ladies could get a crick in their necks looking up at him, it was fair for it to be the other way around once in a while, right? And the moment felt right! Every instinct told him so!

Balyn leaned in, tilting his head up, and, though his aim was a little off, managed to press a warm, passionate kiss mostly onto her open lips.

" _RROAWRR!"_

He was barely sober enough to process that this reaction meant she found his conduct objectionable, a moment before she expounded further on the concept with a sweep of her claws that tore off the front half of his skull.

~X X X~

The Doll was glaring at Balyn in disapproval when he woke up in the Hunter's Dream. He wasn't sure quite how he knew that, given that her porcelain face bore the same placid, fixed expression as it always did, but he could feel the weight of her displeasure.

"Look, it was really Djura's fault!" he protested at once. Passing the blame to absent friends was a tradition men had followed since far older times than Pthumerian days. "He kept going on and on about how the beasts of Old Yharnam were really people and no threat to anyone in the city above and how I should spare their lives. So when I got to that ruined church I figured, well, I was only there for that chalice Gehrman mentioned. And she seemed like she was kinda blood-starved, and I had this sack full of cocktails I wasn't using, so I tossed her a couple. And it seemed to work! I mean, she was totally focused on them, not me at all, and then I figured that it seemed kind of rude to stand around watching someone drink alone…"

He hadn't realized that dolls could sigh.

~X X X~

 _A/N: Readers whose minds have not been too frenzied by the eldritch puns will recall that Balyn celebrated defeating the BSB on his first attempt back in Chapter 12. I think we can assume that this didn't really count as an attempt at a fight. Or that he was trying very hard to blot his embarrassment out of his mind. (Or, although it might be a little too meta, we can always fall back on NG+ as a solution.)_


	19. By a Strict Interpretation of Canon Law

**Omake Week 2017, Day 3:** _These omake, which I wrote back in July, are as I edit them suddenly seeming weirdly prophetic of the fact that my wife and I watched_ Monster Musume _this month. That said, at least this encounter is less "monster girl" and more "legal puns."_

~X X X~

When he'd stepped into the Grand Cathedral over the bodies of its crucifix-bearing guardians, Balyn had expected to find answers. This was the heart of the Cathedral Ward, the wellspring of the Healing Church, where they kept their holy medium, the fountainhead of their blood healing.

Just looking around Oedon Chapel, at its décor and at the white-faced church servants patrolling the streets outside had given the hunter a slight suspicion that the Healing Church was not exactly on the side of the angels (or at least if it was, said angels weren't things he wanted anywhere near him). The staircase leading up inside the Cathedral's door to its main floor had only deepened the impression, flanked as it was by statues of inhuman warriors with oblong heads like a warped webwork of stone with hints of eyes peeking out from within.

Balyn was certain then, when he stalked across the floor towards the lone woman mouthing sanguinary prayers before the altar, that at last he was going to learn some of what was really going on in Yharnam. A few good, long conversations would be just what was needed to put things into some kind of perspective.

Instead, he got a fresh example of how clerics became the most ferocious beasts.

She was actually kind of pretty: none of the open sores and rotting encrustations that marked some of the creatures he'd seen, no oozing poison seeping from her pores, but an elegantly pointed muzzle and sleek white fur. The owners of a fine elkhound would have been impressed (though the term "elkhound" generally didn't literally extend to having antlers).

One might even find aesthetic admiration for the efficiency with which her teeth sliced through Balyn's hunter's garb and the flesh and bone beneath, but he wasn't able to take it quite that far. Perhaps, he thought as he lost consciousness, he simply did not possess the artistic temperament.

~X X X~

"Is there any fire paper left in this place?" Balyn asked, rummaging through the large chest he'd been using to stow his extra gear.

"Pardon me, good hunter?"

He shoved aside a couple of Molotov cocktails and picked up a tricorn hat, but the only things beneath it were a handful of bullets, and…was that tomb mold, or just something growing where he'd spilled a blood vial?

"Maybe I should have taken the time to actually organize this stuff." He turned and looked up at the Doll. "Do you have any idea where the beast blood pellets are?"

"I believe that you stuffed them into the toes of your tomb prospector's boots?"

"Oh, yeah, thanks."

"May I ask what it is that you are doing?"

"I blundered into Vicar Amelia without being prepared to fight a giant beast, so I want to get ready before I go back."

"That is…surprisingly long-sighted of you, good hunter."

She really did sound surprised, too. Balyn decided to ignore that. A man needed to protect his pride.

"Well, this isn't just some ordinary beast, here. We're talking about the Vicar of the Healing Church herself. I have been chased around by those gray-suited thugs, stepped on by clanking giants, kidnapped by those creepy guys with the sacks, rescued a nun whom I'm pretty certain is going to murder somebody if I don't treat her gently, and don't even get me started about those old ladies in Hemwick that I'm pretty sure work for them, too. Amelia's assorted underlings, minions, and lackeys have been up to no good generally and chasing me specifically all over town with clubs, knives, and random pointy stuff."

He lifted his saw cleaver, noting the sharp teeth so effective in shredding beasts.

"So I'm going back to the Grand Cathedral, and I'm going to impose some…vicarious liability."

~X X X~

 _A/N: Failing to follow the general advice of "don't explain the joke," in law "vicarious liability" is the doctrine that you can hold an superior liable for the actions of their employees. I have a feeling it's actually the same word root as "vicar," given that it deals with the same concept (the substitution of an agent's authority for that of the person who appoints the agent; if you're that curious about the clerical rank of "Vicar," you probably should look it up)._


	20. Socially Responsible Hunting is Hard

**Omake Week 2017, Day 5:** _In Balyn's defense, "just run in a circle until it's done" is not the most obvious strategy. And I think a lot of parents would sympathize with his point!_

~X X X~

At first, Balyn didn't find the Wet Nurse's special attack all that intimidating. Sure, she was an invisible robed horror with six blade-wielding arms that hit like a runaway carriage, but since he'd woken up in the Hunter's Dream, Balyn had faced off against monsters that could shower the room in clouds of their poisoned blood, smash their fists into the ground so hard the shockwave could damage him twenty feet away, summon giant snakes, call meteors down out of the abyssal cosmos, and summon exploding corpses that rained down from the sky.

Turning out the lights in Mergo's Lunarium just wasn't very scary by comparison.

It was, however, extremely effective. Particularly when he chased her down, slashing at her robes and the unseen flesh beneath, and suddenly he found her slashing at _his_ back despite her being in _front_ of him.

At first, Balyn thought it was because of her long, serpentine limbs, flexible enough to reach out and around him, but as he rolled away, he found her appearing almost on top of him…while she was still across the room.

"This is absolutely not fair!" he yelped, pushing back to his feet just in time to avoid another half-dozen slashes. Balyn started to run, deciding that the only sensible strategy was to flee until the lights came back on.

Unfortunately, before he could get up to speed, one of the Wet Nurses lashed out, arms extending over thirty feet from her body to impale her scimitars through his back and leave the hunter bleeding out on the cracked and broken stones.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter," the Doll addressed him politely. As always, her expression was placid and gentle, which was not particularly surprising as that was how her sculptor had fashioned it. It was that unchanging face, perhaps, that gave Balyn the impulse to blurt out his stray thoughts.

"Do you ever wonder if we're doing the right thing?"

"I…am not sure that I understand, good hunter."

"Hunting, I mean. Going out into the waking world and killing stuff. That Djura guy was pretty sure the beasts in Old Yharnam weren't hurting anyone who didn't barge in on them, for example."

She didn't say anything, so he pressed on.

"And the Great Ones and their kin, too. I mean, they're really _weird_ , sure, but they don't actually have it in for us. Most of the harm they do is caused by people sticking their nose where they shouldn't. Like this Mergo kid. He's just a baby! It isn't _his_ fault those crazy guys from Yahar'gul wanted to meet him so badly that they'd do this ritual that ended up screwing with the boundaries between reality and the nightmare world, right?"

"That is a…surprisingly profound thought."

She didn't add _for you_ to the end of that sentence. The Doll was usually polite like that.

"Might I ask what has brought on these philosophical thoughts?"

"Eh, it's this thing that killed me just now. I mean, I know, I've got to finish her off or the blood moon is going to drive everyone in Yharnam mad or turn them into beasts or worse. But I feel bad about doing it. I mean, it's important that kids grow up right, and somebody who has six hands and can be in two places at once seems perfectly suited to child care."


	21. It's Probably Patches's Fault, Really

**Omake Week 2017, Day 7:** _And we finish off Omake Week where we began, with yet more_ Bloodborne _. I apologize to anybody who was really hoping for one of my other series (...I think it's been three years since I've done an_ Omake of the Godless Month _short, for example), and for an excuse, well, I can only refer to the title of this story!_

~X X X~

The hands were everywhere.

Balyn supposed that he shouldn't be surprised. The thing _did_ have eight of them, after all. Or did the back two count as legs? He wasn't quite sure of how that worked, especially as the Amygdalae spent most of their time clinging, spider-like, to the sides of buildings.

Whichever it was, there were at least six hands, flailing like a webwork of pain all around its front and sides. Balyn rolled like a madman, left, right, gauging the extent of the thing's reach and then flinging himself out of the way when he got it wrong. Again.

But then, it all came together. Amygdala lunged for him, slamming its outstretched hands into the ground—but he had stepped back just a couple of feet, making all the difference between a pancake and being just fine, and then charged in again. Its head was down, thrust forward as its body had come nearly prone with the lungs. Down—and in reach! He chopped once with his saw cleaver, twice, then as it started to lift a third whipping, overhead strike with the extended blade caught its "chin" just before it got out of range—and its head dropped again. Dazed. Stunned.

 _Helpless!_

It was only a few seconds, he knew. For something like this, getting its bell rung would be no more than a moment's annoyance. But he was ready! He could have shoved his glove in between the bony webwork of his head, ripped out whatever matter he could grab hold of, but Balyn had a different plan. Something special.

He brought up his left arm. Without the enhanced flesh of a hunter, he could never have carried the massive cannon strapped to it, let alone held the thing stable. The sheer mass of a dozen quicksilver bullets, charged with the explosive force of the Powder Kegs' ridiculous machine, charged _again_ with Bone Marrow Ash from Hemwick, slammed into the monster's egg-shaped head.

What was left of that egg afterwards was very, very scrambled.

~X X X~

"I trust things went well, good hunter?" the Doll asked.

"Uh huh! How could you tell?"

"Your hunter's hat includes a cloth mask, and yet your smirk is still obvious."

Balyn supposed that might have been a clue.

She looked at him again, a long, measured stare as if she was considering the wisdom of some decision. He was always amazed how much expressiveness she could get from a face that didn't move. It didn't seem possible. But then again, he supposed that a walking, talking, occasionally nap-taking doll wasn't really possible either, by ordinary standards.

"Ordinary" was kind of boring. For all its frustrations (repeated bloody and miserable death chief among them), Balyn thought he would regret it when he eventually woke up from this dream.

 _That probably says more about my mental health than I really want to think too hard about._

The Doll, too, seemed to have decided to seize her courage in both hands and take a foolhardy step into Things Men And Eldritch Dolls Were Not Meant To Know.

"If I may ask, good hunter, why was it that you made such elaborate preparations for this fight? In the past, when you were defeated by an enemy, you would simply try again, and again, and again, and again, and—" She broke off, apparently noticing that her precision was making his eyes glaze over. "In any event, you would change tactics only in the most extreme circumstances. Yet this time, after only one encounter, you at once came back here, obtained supplies, worked on that cannon with blood stones for hours to enhance it. What provoked such dedication to defeat Amygdala?"

"There! That's it!" He pointed at her, prompting her to tip her head to one side in curiosity.

"What is 'it'?"

"What you just said! Amygdala. A-mig- _dah_ -la," he repeated, dragging the pronunciation out.

"I do not understand."

"It's supposed to be A- _mig_ -da-la! That cosmic nightmare put the stress on the wrong syllable. Some of these eldritch horrors are pretty strange, but that's just sick and wrong!"

~X X X~

 _A/N: Given that he was driven to use the cannon strategy, you might say that Balyn was...triggered._


	22. Single Abomination Seeks Good Man

If there was one truth Balyn had learned in his time as a hunter, it was that rubbery blue things really didn't like being stabbed or electrified. Which made it terribly inconvenient that his rifle spear couldn't be rubbed with Bolt Paper to give it that extra zap, and his saw cleaver was no good for stabbing.

 _Maybe I should take up fencing_ , he thought. _That Reiterpallasch would be perfect for this._

A thirty-foot-long tentacle whipped him across the face and sent him flying.

 _Maybe I should pay more attention to what I'm doing?_

Dazed from the impact, he tried to get back to his feet. Ebrietas did not appear to be charging him down to follow up her advantage. Balyn momentarily felt a surge of relief, before he realized that the sparks forming over her head were not just aftereffects of the blow but that he was literally seeing stars. Channeled from the heart of the abyssal cosmos, blinding blasts of energy speared out, puncturing him again and again until death mercifully embraced him once more.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter."

Balyn cupped his chin in his gloved hand and regarded the Doll thoughtfully. If she was surprised by him being thoughtful about anything, she didn't show it.

"You always say the same thing whenever I come back to the Hunter's Dream," he finally said.

"Does this create a problem?"

"No, it's just, well, you've been here a while, and I'd think you'd like to mix it up a bit, expand your horizons."

"I believe that my horizons are sufficiently expansive for my taste."

Balyn sighed.

"Does this disappoint you, good hunter?"

"Well…I guess not. And it's kind of reassuring that after getting sliced, stabbed, stomped, chopped up, chewed, incinerated, shot, mauled, or dropped from a height that I can always come back to a friendly greeting. It's just that after a half-dozen failed attempts to defeat the Daughter of the Cosmos, I'm really starting to think about how my relationships with women always get into a rut and how I can take things to a different level."

~X X X~

 _A/N: I think we can assume the Doll will go and hide Gehrman's copy of_ How to Pick Up Fair Maidens _the next time Balyn leaves the Dream. Just in case._


	23. He Didn't Book That Reservation

Balyn found Cainhurst Castle to be an oddly reassuring place.

It wasn't the lack of danger. On the contrary, he had been pounced upon, stabbed, hit with blowgun darts, and imprisoned by the supernatural force of ghostly wails more times than he could conveniently count, to say nothing of crawling over icy ledges on the outside of the precipice-like walls of the castle keep's exterior.

Rather, it was the familiarity. Apart from the serious flea problem in the courtyard (really, the Healing Church should have sent exterminators instead of Executioners), Cainhurst was basically what he would have expected from an ancient castle reached by riding a ghastly, driverless carriage across a bridge long-before broken. There was the winter scene, everything draped in snow and hoar-frost even though when seen from Hemwick the castle was clearly in the same season as the rest of Yharnam. There were the hunchbacked, mute servants, their elaborate livery a parody of elegant noble dress. There were the screeching ghosts of murdered women, bound to the site of their horrific deaths.

Balyn wasn't even sure what the Lost Children of Antiquity that roosted on the battlements _were_. The way they blended in with the statuary while perched reminded him of gargoyles come to life. Then again, they could have been some kind of beast, twisted to bat-like form by the unique properties of "forbidden" Cainhurst blood. But in either case, they were the sort of monstrosity he would expect to haunt the rafters of a haunted castle. Particularly one belonging to the Vile Cainhurst blood-kin.

After a night filled with the increasingly alien and eldritch cosmic entities, nightmare beings that blurred the very lines between reality and fever-dream, it was strangely comforting to be in the kind of environment that seemed spawned from the pages of three-volume novels.

Probably they had a few of those novels in the castle library, a ridiculously huge structure that filled _three floors_ of this wing, each story itself far larger than an ordinary room with shelves stretching to the ceiling. Its construction was ridiculously fanciful: the first floor had two hidden chambers reachable only by side routes, the second floor had many open floors crisscrossed by narrow bridge-spans, and you couldn't even get to the third floor without opening a secret ladder.

It was, in short, the kind of library where one expected a chivalric romance for a lady's genteel enjoyment to be shelved next to an accursed book of arcane lore of which only a handful of copies had escaped inquisitorial flames.

(Though in all fairness, Yharnam's primary religion would have suppressed unholy books of arcane lore by buying up the entire print run for their own use.)

Curious, Balyn reached for the nearest shelf, hooked a gloved fingertip over the top of a leather-bound tome with brass fittings, and took it down. The title was faded, the gilt script having nearly flaked off in its entirety, so he flipped the cover open.

Ghostly hands, glowing blue, burst from the pages, clutching at the hunter from the end of long, spindly arms. Balyn flung himself back away from their cursed grasp just in time to avoid being seized.

Unfortunately, he had neglected to consider the width of the gallery in his reflexive action.

The back of Balyn's thighs connected with the balustrade, and the force of his leap sent him toppling over, plummeting down, down through the open second floor to crash full-force into a broad scholar's table. His last thought before darkness consumed him was that the ghost he'd nearly landed on looked very startled to see him.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter. Did you have a pleasant time in Castle Cainhurst?" the Doll asked.

"Hmm…I'll have to think about that a bit."

She looked at him curiously. Probably, she would have raised her eyebrows if they hadn't just been painted ridges on her porcelain face.

"I mean, I got killed again." Balyn was amazed at just how blasé he was starting to become about that. But then again, maybe other people would be equally casual about the process; it was just hard to get their opinions after the fact.

"That does not sound particularly promising."

"Well, I suppose not…but this time, I was killed by an eldritch book in the castle library."

"I don't believe I've ever heard you mention anything about such a thing before."

"Nope! So at the very least, you can say that I've had a novel experience!"

~X X X~

 _A/N: While some may consider this story cheating in order to justify a book pun, I will point out that it's perfectly plausible that the books in Cainhurst's library are filled with cursed attack hands like those in_ Dark Souls III's _Grand Archives, and that's why actual player characters are bright enough to not mess with them. Unlike Balyn._


	24. Not the Warm Welcome He Wanted

Balyn liked to think of himself as a convivial person. Maybe not "charming," per se, in the sense of being a social butterfly, but a pleasant sort of fellow who could get along with most people and find common ground. In that respect, he found Yharnam to be a bit depressing. The people were standoffish and unwelcoming to an outsider like himself. Closed doors, peals of mocking laughter, growing fur and claws before trying to eat his spleen, it was nothing but one rude act after another.

Even here, in the ghastly nightmare of the Fishing Hamlet, was he greeted with convivial fellowship, maybe a few shared pots of ale in between swapping complaints about how awful Yharnam's Healing Church was? No! And while Balyn didn't hold it against a fellow if he had tumorous growths spotting his fishbelly-white skin, a lipless mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, and clawed, webbed hands, when that fellow was trying to ram a harpoon through Balyn's intestines, well, it just didn't seem neighborly.

"Positively standoffish, is what you are," he groused, knocking the harpoon shaft aside with his saw cleaver. Balyn slashed the fishman across the chest, and the twisted creature fell back, but from further up along the shore another fishman hurled a harpoon at him and he was forced to quickly leap back, into the shallow water of the village's central lagoon.

Ah, well, at least his boots were already soaked through; a little more water wouldn't hurt.

The wounded fishman was in no mood to back away from the fight just because he'd been hurt a bit. Gripping his harpoon in both hands, he again charged Balyn. The hunter gave ground, dodging a massive overhand stab, his foot clunking against an old jar as he backpedaled. Taking his chance from the missed stab—the fishman was obviously not a trained fighter—he dashed in and slashed, cutting his enemy down.

Keeping his attention on the creature he was fighting, though, with an eye out for the one chucking harpoons at him, left Balyn with no chance to notice a third fishman appearing at one of the upper windows of a rotting hovel. The only hint he had of the creature's presence was a spark of light in his peripheral vision as a thrown Molotov cocktail arced over his head.

Balyn did notice, though, when that Molotov landed among the clay jars of slug oil he was standing beside, and the volatile chemical detonated in an explosion powerful enough to slaughter anything within twenty feet.

On the plus side, if he'd lived through it, the heat from the fire would have dried out his boots nicely.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter."

The Plain Doll (which made no sense at all; she was actually rather pretty, and at least in Balyn's experience dolls that walked and talked were in no way ordinary, so neither definition of "plain" applied) was always consistent in her greeting.

"Do you ever get bored, saying that every time I come back to the Hunter's Dream?" Balyn asked, checking his hat for stray ashes. Whatever magic kept resurrecting did a good job cleaning his clothes each time, but it never hurt to check. The Messengers seemed nice enough, but he wasn't sure he could trust them to use the right amount of starch on his shirt collars.

"Pardon me?"

"Well, I do die a lot. I thought you might be getting tired of saying the same thing every time. I assume it's a job thing, right, like how a shopgirl greats a customer?"

The Doll gave him a look that eloquently suggested he was a babbling idiot. Balyn was always impressed how expressive her face was, given that it didn't actually move.

"Sorry; I didn't mean to be annoying." Satisfied that his hat was clean, he set it back in place. "I'm just a bit bothered by the lack of friendly spirit here in Yharnam. When the dolls are more sympathetic than the people, a town has got a problem. And what's worse, it's starting to affect me in combat!"

"Indeed?"

"Definitely! Take this last time, for instance. I was in the Hunter's Nightmare, and I got myself burned to death. I didn't even think to keep a look out for possible fire attacks in a hamlet full of such cold fish."


	25. Some Madman, Maybe?

Balyn, after careful thought, had come to the conclusion that he was not fond of the labyrinths unlocked by the so-called Holy Chalices.

Really, that word "holy" was an initial clue to the way things would go. Religion and worship in Yharnam generally involved howling madness, beings whose sympathetic spirit was only tangentially related to actual sympathy, and vast quantities of shed blood. It was politically, spiritually, and often biologically corrupt.

And what good, exactly, could come out of a "sacred" rite performed at a gravestone using blood that stubbornly refused to properly dry out and a bunch of plucked eyeballs? Stumbling through a mazework of twisted, poison-soaked catacombs haunted by emaciated watchers endlessly toiling to expand the tombs was no more than he deserved.

Going back for more, at an even lower depth of those hintertombs? At that point the only person Balyn had to blame was himself.

"Welcome home, good hunter."

"No, the plain fact is, I was an idiot to expect anything better."

"If you say so, good hunter."

Balyn looked up sharply, surprised by the voice of the Doll. He hadn't noticed that she'd come over or heard her initial greeting. He studied her placid expression for hints of sarcasm, but found none, possibly because she was, in fact, a doll.

Not that the fact her face didn't move had ever stopped her from displaying emotion before. Or from talking, for that matter.

"If I may ask, what befell you in the lower hintertombs to provoke you?"

Balyn shrugged.

"The usual. I mean, I'm happy that the Dream keeps calling me back to life, and I certainly wouldn't want to try to be a hunter without it, but it's kind of embarrassing, especially when I think about people like Gerhman and Ludwig and how they didn't have to die three or four times before they could beat some enemy."

"What was it that you found so frustrating?" The phrase "this time" remained unsaid, but it lingered there nonetheless.

Images flashed through Balyn's mind, of a greatsword alight with pale blue arcane resonance...or was it a giant hammer crushing his bones to powder? He pushed up his hat and scratched his head.

"You know...I think it was some guy, but maybe I hit my head or something, or whatever keeps me from remembering my life from before coming to Yharnam is having a recurrence...but whatever it was, I've gone and forgotten him."


	26. Beyond Nightmare

_A/N: A bit different in tone, this one._

~X X X~

The fog cleared, like the transition between sleep and waking—though who could say in which direction? Especially when Balyn had begun his journey within what was already a dream, sinking into the ritual of a Holy Chalice to unseal a buried tomb, or perhaps the nightmare of one. He had done it many times now, strengthening himself with the relics of the ancient Pthumerians, and was already anticipating his next hunt in the depths…

"Wait, what?"

He blinked twice. This was not what he had expected to find. He was not in a cramped chamber of ancient stone. Rather, he stood on a platform in a great black gulf. There was no ceiling, no walls…and most disturbingly of all, no ghostly lamp to serve as a beacon for the Messengers to bear him back to the Hunter's Dream.

Balyn's hand tightened around the handle of his saw cleaver.

In front of him were double doors, a high, arched thing like the portals of a cathedral, even down to the rose window above the arch's point that shone with hints of light beyond even though chunk of wall in which the doorway stood was surrounded by the same black void as was above and below. Swirling nightmare fog covered the twin portals, making it hard for Balyn to see the elaborate carvings.

 _Nothing ventured, nothing gained,_ he decided, and stepped forward. He did not know what he'd find on the opposite side of the doorway, but he had a feeling he wouldn't like it.

As it turned out, what was on the opposite side of the door came and found _him_. Massive, rubbery tentacles thicker than Balyn's body reached out of the fog, slamming into the ground, smashing into him and knocking him sprawling. He only barely rolled away from another assault, falling back out of range of the writhing limbs.

Balyn shivered, gritting his teeth behind the cloth of his hunter's mask. He had seen many strange and unnatural things since waking in Yharnam, but the way the flailing tentacles, possessed of very substantial physical reality according to the testimony of his new bruises, were able to move up and down, in and out, passing through the doors without meeting any apparent resistance was somehow one of the most uncanny of all. It was as if the doors were not there at all, like a reflection on the surface of the water.

The hunter was nothing if not curious. Complete strangers had mentioned it before, comparing his need to uncover secrets to the spirit of Byrgenwerth, or offering him to liberate him from that wild curiosity at sword's-point. The truth was more simple: though awful as the answers tended to be, the _not knowing_ was often worse. Balyn was possessed of an annoyingly good imagination.

Gripping his cleaver tightly, Balyn watched the movement of the tentacles closely, following them until he saw his chance. He charged forward, whipping the saw-toothed weapon around in an arc above him as he ducked beneath a swipe. The saw bit into the tentacle, drawing blood—it _was_ real, indeed, not just some arcane projection—and the thing jerked back in pain, opening a path for Balyn to hurl himself against the doors.

Which he did, in quite literal fashion.

"Ow!"

The doors _were_ doors, solid and unyielding as any other matter. They weren't some kind of illusion. And yet at close range, it was even more obvious that the tentacles passed _through_ them like they weren't even there.

Without hesitation, without even a pause for conscious thought, Balyn threw his weight against the doors, pushing the twin gates open.

And he screamed.

It was not that he found himself face-to-face with the thing the tentacles belonged to. That was a little bit startling, but, well, he'd been expecting _something_ to be there. Nor was it the inhuman nature of the shambling horror, its roughly oblong body from which the five (the one at the back apparently having been unable to reach around to get to the doors) great tentacles sprouted. Yes, the thing was grotesque, but nowhere near so awful in his opinion as the corpse-mass of the One Reborn, the eye-studded Brain of Mensis, or the poison-weeping, flayed body of the Blood-Starved Beast. Yharnam was full of horrors, and Balyn had faced most without flinching.

No, what terrified him about this creature was not the details of its appearance, but rather the lack of them. The thing's body was unnaturally smooth, its skin lacking texture. Looking at it, Balyn had the sensation that if he put a slice of the thing's flesh under a magnifying lens, or one of the microscopes he'd seen at Byrgenwerth, he'd see nothing more than his naked eyes showed him now, as if the very atoms that made up this monstrosity were swelled to visible size. It was as if Nature had begin to put this horror together, then stopped halfway, shrugged, and left its work undone.

Past the creature he thought he got a glimpse of a vast shore, of a great dark lake beneath a cloud-swept sky, and it might have been just possible to dodge past the creature, to fight it under the impossible moon that he could only see _through_ the doorway, not _around_ it, but it was too late for that. Balyn's hesitation had cost him, and he would not now be able to see how it was that the other side of a free-standing bit of wall could be outdoors while this side was not.

The blow caught him flatfooted, and he was sent hurtling back, not even touching the short flight of steps but hitting the platform on which he'd arrived and skidding across the flagstones. He realized that he'd never actually turned all the way around even as he slid through an open arch and off the ragged edge of the stone. He flailed for purchase, his fingertips just brushing the rough side of a block, and then he was falling.

But it was not through open space that he fell.

Rather, he realized at once, he was plummeting into an endless gray void. Below him, to all sides, there was nothing at all, an endless gray _sameness_ that stretched unchanging in all directions. Above, rapidly receding, he could see the arch he'd fallen through, the underside of the platform, but nothing of the black void—only the eternal gray. Just as how on the other side of the doors there had been that eldritch shore, here on this side of the arch there was only this gray nothingness, no, a void more pure than even the empty vastness of the cosmos. It was as if he fell through the absolute absence of reality, what was there even before the gods defined "emptiness." Somehow, he'd intruded into a realm where even the _concept_ of "nothing" had yet to come into existence, and he wondered if he would indeed fall endlessly, until there was a terrific wrenching within him, as if life itself was too complex an idea to exist in this plane of undefined reality…

…and he found himself sprawled on his back in the Hunter's Dream, the ephemeral reality of the dreamscape so blessedly tangible by comparison. Convulsively, he lashed out, and the sole of his boot struck the chalice and knocked it from its stone perch. He scrambled away, half crawling, half trying to stand, only to crash into the legs of the Doll.

"Good hunter, what is it. What ails you so?"

"I…there was…" he stammered, clutching at her dress. Try as he might, the words would not come. She seemed to sense the nature of his distress, though, for she put one arm around him to hold him close and gently stroked the back of his head with articulated fingers.

"Shh…All will be well, good hunter. You need not force yourself to put words to the unspeakable. For are there not, even among the haunted seekers after eldritch truth and the whispers of the Great Ones as they dream, things that man was never meant to know?"

~X X X~

 _A/N: Shout-out to Zullie the Witch for data-mining the unfinished content and dev rooms and for setting up glyphs where players could get to experience it for themselves!_

 _And hey, what better time than when dealing with things that are not meant to be for letting the Doll have the finishing joke?_


	27. Politeness Should Be a Two-Way Street

Ordinarily, Balyn would have been happy for a straight-up one-on-one fight. The various creatures of Yharnam liked to live up to their animal natures and come at him in packs. Whether it was a party of prowling huntsmen who hadn't noticed, somehow, that they themselves were already halfway to being beasts, or a congregation of rag-clad beast patients in the burned-out ritual hall, or small armies of towering, slack-faced servants of the Healing Church, or even just tangled balls of hissing, poison-fanged snakes, the hunter was well-conditioned to have to keep an eye out in all directions, not just on what he was trying to fight.

And when he didn't have to face a crowd of bloodthirsty enemies, it was usually because the thing he _was_ fighting was some giant monstrosity that didn't leave enough space in the room for a second one of them. Towering beasts that had once been clerics, undead horrors that crackled with unnatural blue sparks, giants that looked like reanimated monstrosities with hooks, clubs, and _cannons_ stitched right into their corpse-like flesh, he'd had to fight it all.

So when Balyn had finally managed to get to the very bottom of the lowest depths of the forgotten hintertombs and found himself faced with only a single guardian, he had been relieved. Sure, the humanoid figure was, even in its withered and hunched state, several feet taller than Balyn, but that was only par for the course. Even the smallest of the Pthumerian lineage, the spindly watchers who haunted the labyrinth corridors in droves, were human-sized, and their chieftains were giant, bloated monstrosities far larger than this one foe.

All right, the way that he could turn his staff into a variety of different weapons made of living fire turned out to be slightly annoying, but Balyn was prepared for such tricks. He hadn't been born yesterday, after all. Or at least he thought he hadn't, though he couldn't actually remember yesterday and Yharnam could be an odd place... Anyway, the point was, he himself used trick weapons and the idea that his enemies could as well made perfect sense. Even the "made of fire" part, since this was, after all, a Pthumerian elder and if there was one thing he knew about Pthumerian society it was that eldritch abominations were standard operating procedure.

Therefore, when the elder began to spin his staff over his head, sending a rain of meteors arcing through the air to explode down around Balyn, the hunter did not spend his time boggling at what was going on. Instead, he reacted at once, dodging forward through the spinning fireballs, gritting his teeth as glancing strikes scorched him but never breaking stride, until he burst out the other side of the flaming hail to catch his enemy completely off-guard. Once, twice he lashed out with his saw cleaver, slashing into the withered Pthumerian, then raised the weapon and brought it down for the finishing blow.

Or, it _would_ have been the finishing blow, had it not passed through empty air.

Balyn cast his gaze left and right, desperately trying to figure out where the Pthumerian had gotten to. The room was featureless and empty; there was nowhere for him to hide, so either he was invisible or else—

The firebolt that tore through Balyn's back told him that "or right behind you" was in fact the correct answer. He did not have time to feel smug about having identified that before darkness claimed him.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter. What is it that you desire?"

Balyn looked the Doll square in the eyes.

"I want to know who's in charge of the rules of etiquette around here."

She tipped her head to one side in an attitude of curiosity, a posture that gave her audience the impression that she was looking at something that made no sense whatsoever.

Balyn got that expression a lot.

"The rules...of etiquette?"

"Yeah, because I've got a bone to pick with them. I may not actually remember it, but I'm pretty sure that I was raised being told to respect my elders, and right now I don't see that happening any time soon!"


	28. A Failure of Diplomacy

It was one of the strangest things Balyn had yet experienced on the night of the hunt.

That was a statement that should not be made casually. His experiences in Yharnam had been grotesquely eye-opening, as he'd met ever-more-hideous beasts, wizened little manikins that transported him in and out of fantastic and appalling dream-worlds, and cosmic horrors that redefined his understanding of reality by their very existence. Not to mention the walking, talking, praying, and occasionally sleeping animated doll that somebody (probably that creepy Gehrman fellow; he certainly seemed like he had some curious mania) had spent _way_ too much time building. So when he said things were strange by the standard of the Blood Moon, that _meant_ something.

But…what else was he supposed to call it?

Little blue creatures, almost human but for their glowing yellow eyes and weirdly bulbous heads, tottered towards him on spindly legs, slapping at him with their six-fingered hands.

He stabbed them with his rifle spear, and they fell over dead.

Eventually, one of them swelled up to triple its starting size in a puff of blue energy…and continued to slap at him just as aimlessly. Balyn's biggest problem in sidestepping was in convincing himself that yes, it really was attacking him in such a weak and pathetic fashion.

Shrugging, he stabbed the thing three more times and it exploded like a popped balloon, leaving him alone in the garden full of closed lumenflowers.

"Huh."

There was a large picture window that bore investigating later, since if he had his mental geography right it looked into the Grand Cathedral's upper balcony, but just then he figured it was better to simply light the lamp (where _did_ those things come from, anyway?) and return to the Hunter's Dream.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter," the Doll greeted Balyn as usual upon his return. She regarded him solemnly for a long minute, as if something about his matter had caught her attention. Then, hesitantly, with the air of a person overcome by curiosity but dreading the potential consequence of acting upon it, she at last asked, "You seem somehow troubled. Is something wrong, good hunter?"

Balyn frowned, cupping his chin in his hand.

"I'm not really sure. I was just in the Upper Cathedral Ward, and I fought one of the Choir's experiments, a gigantic Celestial Emissary."

"Is it the aftereffects of the creative and doubtlessly grotesque methods of violent death it subjected you to that is disturbing you now?"

"No, and that's what's bothering me!"

She tipped her head to one side, observing him as if she wasn't quite sure which of them required an alienist.

"The whole point of this Hunter's Dream thing is that if I get killed out there, I come back to life, right? So when I fight tough beasts and other creatures, I go out and learn from my mistakes. But this time…I didn't die. I wasn't even hurt!"

It was remarkable how a porcelain face that could not move could display such obvious doubt and concern.

"Hunters have told me about how, when they come to this dream, they have difficulty remembering the events of their past lives. Is it possible that you are suffering from a recurrence of this?"

"…I would probably be upset at your lack of confidence if I hadn't been asking myself the same question. But no: it really, honestly happened that way."

"How passing strange."

Balyn shook his head. Weirdness aside, he needed to get back to work. He was sure that the Choir still had more secrets that needed to be hunted out.

"Still and all, it's a good lesson to learn."

"A lesson, good hunter?"

He nodded.

"The value of quality craftsmanship. Because unless what the Choir wanted their emissary to tell the Great Ones is that humans are lousy builders, I don't think that anybody out there got the message."


	29. He Won't Just Bug Out

"Seriously, what is your problem?" yelped Balyn as a spider slashed at his legs with long, hooked forelimbs. He danced aside, just out of reach, then flung himself forward as another one pounced at him, its rock-like head descending like a spear point. "I _like_ spiders! You guys eat flies and all kinds of creepy bugs. Like those things with all the eyes back in Byrgenwerth. Go up there, spin some webs, and eat _them_!"

The spiders did not seem to accept his suggestion. They continued to scuttle after him across the surprisingly firm surface of the moonlit lake. One spat a glob of webbing at him (and come to think of it, wasn't spider silk supposed to come out of the other end?) that he only just dodged.

"Well, this isn't getting us anywhere," he decided. Balyn fired his blunderbuss at the nearest spider, the cluster of pellets knocking it twitching over onto its back, and he dashed forward through the gap, sprinting right at his real target. His saw cleaver crackled with electricity, sparks set alight by the coarse bolt paper he'd rubbed on it. He slashed the serrated blade down at the giant bug's unprotected side—

—and Rom spun, far faster than something of her giant bulk and lack of any meaningful legs ought to have been able to move, so that the blade fell onto the stone-like latticework of her head. The rock was as hard as it looked; Balyn's saw clanked off—indeed, it was almost jolted out of his hand.

The small spider that pounced on him when he staggered at last did him the mercy of taking him out before Rom flopped her full body weight over onto where his disappearing corpse had been standing.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter," the Doll greeted Balyn on his return to the Hunter's Dream.

"I'm back," he said, somewhat obviously.

"What is it you desire?"

"Is there any bug repellent around here?"

She blinked in confusion. "Bug…repellent?"

 _Huh. I didn't know she had articulated eyelids_ , Balyn thought. Out loud he said, "Yeah, I'm having trouble with that weird spider in Byrgenwerth. Though it's really more like a giant centipede or a pillbug or that kind of thing, even though all its little friends are definitely arachnids."

"I…understand? I think?" the Doll said, clearly not understanding a thing but doubtless wanting to protect herself against being given further insights into the Hunter's mind.

Balyn waved a hand.

"Eh, it's okay. That thing's just too vacuous to know when to give up. But I'm not going to quit. Rom may be stubborn, but there's no way she's as hard-headed as me!"

"You have my complete confidence in that, good hunter."


	30. Less Obscure Than He Thinks

The Hunter's Workshop was not only a place for physical upgrades. Yes, its primary focus was on making modifications to a hunter's weapons by reinforcing them with blood stones or kneading gems into them to produce unusual effects. Yes, it was further used to store an inventory of devices and equipment useful in hunter's work, from bullets to antidotes to fire paper. But the workshop was also a place of learning, of bookshelves where hunters would store notes, research, and theories about their enemies. After all, knowing the attributes of one's prey was essential to skilled hunting, a vital part of the role.

That the Doll was staring in apparent bewilderment at the sight of Balyn seated at one of the desks, furiously leafing through a stack of books, therefore, said a great deal about the workshop's current Hunter.

"Good hunter, what are you doing?" she finally asked, venturing where less courageous animated mannequins feared to tread.

"Research!" Balyn declared. After about five seconds of silence ticked by, it dawned on him that perhaps more was needed by way of explanation. "The Bloodletting Beast. I ran into it in the lower Pthumerian tombs, and it's been giving me fits."

"So, you are trying to see if any of the old hunters encountered such a beast before, and can identify a suitable strategy?"

She probably should have known better.

"I want to know what its name means."

"Pardon me?"

"Bloodletting! Why would they name a beast _that_?"

The Doll blinked.

"I…do not know."

"I've found records that talk about a weapon called a 'Bloodletter' that some people thought was a way to expel tainted blood. Does the Bloodletting Beast do the same thing? Is it a source of blood? Might it even be where the Healing Church got some of its Old Blood from? Or is _it_ engaged in bloodletting, trying to expel the tainted beast blood from its _own_ body and cure its beasthood? Is there some connection to how the Blood- _Starved_ Beasts I've encountered are half-flayed? There are so many links here, but no one seems to have any firm answers. It's just a lot of speculation and guesswork!"

The Doll tipped her head to one side, curious.

"Will knowing this help you to hunt this beast?"

"Well, yes, obviously, or…um…er…maybe? I suppose it could, if it…well, it might reveal some attribute that…" Balyn's voice trailed off. "All right, I admit it. It's just a personal annoyance. I just want to know because it bugs me. I guess Lady Maria was right about that whole 'wild curiosity' thing. But haven't you ever just looked at something, and some part of it just didn't make sense, and you were just driven to learn _why_ because it nags and nags at you? Haven't you ever had that feeling?"

It was her turn to stare at him for several seconds before she answered.

"Indeed, good hunter, I find myself confronting that emotion quite often of late."

Balyn opened his mouth to respond, then shut it again and picked up his saw cleaver.

"…Maybe I'd better just get back to the dungeon."

~X X X~

While most of the giant beasts that Balyn had slain took heavily after the wolflike scourge beasts with their long muzzles set with far too many ripping, rending fangs, the Bloodletting Beast was different. It reminded him more of the distorted huntsmen from Central Yharnam, their bodies cloaked in fur but their faces still basically flat and human-like. It had abandoned clothing in favor of its shaggy pelt, and it carried no spear or saw, but things that stood thirty feet tall or more tended to have trouble finding gear sized to match.

Not that it needed any.

Balyn danced and darted back and forth, trying to get at the creature's legs. He ripped at them with his saw, drawing sprays of blood. The beast's claws whipped past, and Balyn couldn't help but think of legends of swords sharp enough to cleave the air itself—he would have sworn that they missed him, but they still opened a row of slashes along his side.

At least, when it pounded the ground and the shockwave knocked him sprawling, the festering pit the beast inhabited shook with the impact.

Wincing, Balyn pushed himself back to his feet, but it was too late. The beast had pivoted; it raised its clenched fists above its head, and brought them down in a devastating hammer-blow. The effect was not unlike dropping a stone block onto a grape; blood splattered everywhere as darkness claimed Balyn yet again.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter," the Doll greeted him.

Balyn groaned, deciding whether to get up out of the surprisingly comfortable grass.

"Well, I think I figured out how the Bloodletting Beast got its name."


	31. Memories Aren't Their Stock in Trade

"Viola," Balyn murmured, reading the engraving on the back of the ornate brooch. The piece of jewelry matched what the little girl had described, and if he needed any more evidence the gem itself was all the proof he needed. It was no common, ornamental stone, but a blood gem, a hunter's prize and tool, the kind of thing Father Gascoigne would have collected in his career purging Yharnam's beasts.

Of course, that raised the question of why Gascoigne had given the gem to his wife instead of using it himself, but frankly Balyn didn't really care. He'd had the beast-cursed hunter's axe buried in his skull and claws tearing out his viscera too many times to care about exploring the reasons why Gascoigne hadn't made himself _more_ powerful.

Balyn wondered if he should keep the blood gem for himself. The little girl had no need of it, and telling her the sad truth about her family's end was the kind of thing that could probably wait until the night of the hunt was over. But at the same time, would it be right to do so? Leaving aside the entire question of theft (after all, it wasn't like _Viola_ was going to ask for it back), there was the fact that the brooch would be a keepsake for the girl of happier times. Memories were what was important, but something tangible helped to give them form, to anchor the recollections in reality and keep them fresh.

That thought reminded him of something Gascoigne had said before the fight. Once he got back to the Hunter's Dream, he needed to check it out. But first, he had a new key, and Balyn was wildly curious to find out where it led.

~X X X~

"Hmmm…no, that's not really what I'm looking for."

The spindly, manikin-like messengers sunk back into the cloudy depths of the bath, only to rise up moments later carrying new items: a keen-edged throwing knife, a heady cocktail of pungent blood, and a packet of white tablets used to fight against poison.

Balyn shook his head.

"No, this is good stuff, but it isn't right, either."

"What are you doing, good hunter?" Apparently, the Doll, too, had a bit of that wild curiosity in her, beckoning her to ask about what the hunter was up to. Perhaps whatever eldritch force animated her did not include the human quality of knowing when something was best left alone.

(Not that anyone else in Yharnam seemed to know it, either.)

"I'm looking for souvenirs."

She tipped her head to one side, regarding him as if he was some unusual form of life.

"Souvenirs?"

"Yeah. Keepsakes, knickknacks, mementos, that kind of thing. Little figurines of Gerhman or that Ludwig guy I keep hearing about. A framed print of a painting of the Grand Cathedral against a moonlit sky. Plush Cleric Beasts."

"I do not understand, good hunter."

"Well, you told me that countless hunters have visited this dream, right? And you or the messengers or someone built these graves to help you remember _them_. I thought some of us hunters might like something to remember this dream by after we've left. You could probably make a lot of blood echoes that way. But so far, there's nothing. Maybe it's just that I haven't found the right badge yet, but I've pretty much been through the entire inventory here, and no matter what Father Gascoigne thinks, beasts are definitely _not_ all over _this_ shop."


	32. It's Not Just About Blood, You Know

**Omake Week 2018, Day 1:** _For the fifth year in a row, Omake Week somehow makes an appearance! Honestly, this year I half-expected to not manage to pull this off, since for the longest time the only kind of omake I could think up was for_ Bloodborne. _Which makes it the perfect choice to start us off!_

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter," the Doll greeted Balyn. She tipped her head to one side in a now-familiar air of curiosity, as if something about him had caught her interest. "Are you all right?"

"Eh?"

"You lack your usual…verve."

Balyn pursed his lips beneath his mask. She did have a point. By nature, he was a demonstrative person, whether launching himself into new activities with enthusiasm, celebrating his victories, lamenting his defeats, or bitterly and loudly complaining about the vagaries of Yharnam life.

"I'm just feeling a little pensive," he said.

The Doll displayed her inherent strength of character by not shouting, "You!?" Even so, the astonishment hung in the air, so Balyn decided to explain.

"I was just in Oedon Chapel right before I came back here, and I saw something unnerving." Which was saying something, given that humans-turned-beasts were prowling Yharnam's streets and horrific manifestations out of literal nightmare worlds were causing intense confusion about the nature of what was and wasn't reality. "Unnerving" by Yharnam standards went a long, long way.

"Oh? What is that?"

"Well, you know how I've been rescuing folks and sending them there, right? Did I ever tell you about that? Well, anyway, there was this one woman, Arianna. She's a prostitute, even though she dresses like she's some fancy noble from Cainhurst or something. She hasn't been feeling good ever since I killed Rom and the sky got all weird, so it seemed even stranger that she'd be missing, since people don't walk around a lot when they're feeling too sick to do anything.

"I got worried about her, so I looked around the place a bit, and I found that she'd actually gone and climbed down to the cellar…and had a baby! Well, given that she wasn't pregnant when she first came to the chapel, it won't surprise you that the baby wasn't human. Actually, it looked a lot like a newborn version of those things that are wriggling around all over the Upper Cathedral Ward, the ones that look like if you gave them a couple of millennia they'd grow up to look like Ebrietas."

He shivered, thinking about it. It sort of made sense that those things were Ebrietas's babies or spawn or fingerlings or whatever larval Great Ones were called. It made a lot less sense that they'd be born from a _human_ woman.

"I don't know," he continued. "It's like that stuff I read in…Byrgenwerth, was it? About the red moon and a womb being blessed with child? And all that stuff about Formless Oedon, and Arianna's blood being kind of like the forbidden blood of Cainhurst…"

"What did you do?" The Doll seemed more interested in the here and now than obscure ruminations on academic topics.

"I turned right around and walked out of there! I mean, that lady's going to have a hard enough time finding a decent babysitter once the night of the hunt is over. And anything I did was probably going to make matters worse."

"History does suggest something of the kind."

"But I've got to say, that Oedon dude is lucky that he's formless, because if he was here I would have some very pointed remarks for him. I don't care if he's a Great One or the chapel janitor; if he wants a child that badly then he can darned well adopt!"


	33. A Failure to Communicate

**Omake Week 2018, Day 7:** _And we end where we began, back in Yharnam, where the cyclical nature of the Night of the Hunt reflects the cyclical nature of posting these stories for the Week of the Omake. Or something like that..._

~X X X~

"Um…yeah, sure, I'll spare the beasts of Old Yharnam."

The old hunter in ashen gray smiled widely at Balyn.

"Yes, very good." He clapped the younger man heartily on the shoulder. "I no longer dream, but I was once a hunter, too."

"Yeah, I kind of figured that from the stake driver and the blunderbuss, and…did you say dream? Like, the Hunter's Dream? Do you remember a talking doll, about this high?" Balyn held one hand well above his head. Djura just looked at him, then shook his head sadly.

"There's nothing more horrific than a hunt."

 _Wait, is he saying that he thinks I'm hallucinating under the strain?_

"In case you've failed to realize…" Djura went on. "The things you hunt, they're not beasts. They're people."

"Um…I'm pretty sure that they're beasts. I mean, yeah, they obviously started out as people, but right now, they're definitely beasts. People would not be clawing my face off anywhere near as often as has happened here in Yharnam."

Djura shook his head again.

"One day, you will see…"

"If you say so?"

"Hmm, it's time you got going…"

"Yeah, probably." Balyn wasn't quite comfortable hanging around folks of dubious sanity who had access to giant Gatling guns. "Er, see you at the next Hunter's Dream reunion? We could get Eileen, too…Ah, well, maybe not. Anyway, bye. I have to keep looking for Byrgenwerth, anyway."

"But first, a farewell gift."

"Hey, that's nice of you."

With a shrug, Djura added, "I have no use for it anyway."

"Eh, still nice. Oh, hey, is this a badge? And it's the Powder Kegs, neat! I love that rifle spear they designed that I found in that building over there. You know what they say, if a weapon ain't got kick, it just isn't worth it!"

Djura rolled his eyes, or at least the one not bandaged over.

"What is it? Surely I need not repeat myself. Go, I say. You have the whole night to dream. Make the best of it."

"All right, all right, I'm going. Yeesh, don't get so huffy."

Djura pointed to the ladder…with the point of his stake driver.

"Right. Going now."

Balyn scampered to the edge and slid down one ladder, then the second, until he was back outside the Ritual Hall. He felt good about himself; it was nice to make a new friend, even if the old fellow seemed to be a bit of an odd duck. And in all fairness, it wasn't like the beasts of Old Yharnam were climbing up into the city or across into Yahar'gul to attack people, so maybe sparing them wasn't the wrong thing to do.

His train of thought was derailed by the pain of a saw spear ramming through his back. A boot slammed into his spine, kicking him off the spearpoint. Balyn grunted when he hit the filthy cobblestones, then pushed himself back upright.

"Okay, you know what, I said that I would spare the beasts of Old Yharnam," Balyn said, pulling out his saw cleaver and blunderbuss, "but at no time did I make any promises about jerkass hunters!"

~X X X~

 _A/N: Djura's Ally is such an annoying twink. Though maybe not as much as Djura's Disciple with that Gatling Gun in the Nightmare. Splicing in Balyn's dialogue with Djura's game speech was a fun little exercise, though._

 _I wonder if the Doll remembers Djura and Eileen, and what she thought of them._


End file.
